


What If

by nan00k



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-03 22:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2890832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nan00k/pseuds/nan00k
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Washington thinks about the greatest what-ifs of his life. Namely, Epsilon.</p>
<p>[Written for the rvb-shipping-jamboree 2014 for Team Church/Wash.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	What If

**Author's Note:**

> A last minute addition for the Churchington team. :) It was a fun competition! Great stuff from everyone!
> 
> Disclaimer: Red vs. Blue © Rooster Teeth/Halo.  
> Warnings: brief foul language, brief sexual content, major character death (sort of)

He wonders about it like some unwanted daydream that haunts him, pretending to be a memory he forgot.

That what-if world where things hadn’t gone wrong—or rather, they hadn’t gone as god-awful as they wound up being. A world where Carolina still fell from the cliff, but she hadn’t been fighting alone, because Wash would have known. He would have known, in some way, probably losing his mind even more than he had, and he would have fallen with her in one way or another. He would have gone with North and South, or Texas, or fuck, even Maine, because at that point, Wash wasn’t sure whose side he’d be on, if he had really _known_.

If he had known that the screaming voice in his head—who had been there for just moments but it had lasted forever—was real, was something important, wasn’t there to hurt him but to beg for his help. If he had known to listen and to ask—who was Allison, who was Alpha—instead of shutting up like a good soldier when the realization he had crossed a line became clear in the recovery room, with the Director’s vividly unhinged eyes showed their true colors to him for the very first time.

If he had known Epsilon instead of letting them take him away, Wash can only imagine what sort of world it could have been.

 

**0000**

It could have been like this:

He wakes up in the middle of a dead-silent infirmary, his skull pounding and fractured in ways doctors couldn’t fix, but he’s not alone. All of his friends have left and gone—left him behind, because they had to or lost their own ways—but he’s not alone.

_Help me_ , Epsilon asks again, this time clearer and this time Wash hears him in the depths of his mind.

This time, Wash listens.

This time, he hears it all, in that lightening-fast way York had boasted Delta could speak to him, and it takes only moments of lying there. His body feels and looks empty and broken, with its strings cut in the advent of a psychiatric break down, like his records have just then been altered to say.

But with every truth he learns, Wash is broken and then seared back together, over and over. His emptiness is filled back up with anger and regret and pain and betrayal and it paralyzes him. It sets him on fire and drowns him until he finally hears himself breathing, ragged and harsh, even as his body lies so still.

In that life, he drags himself off the bed. He can’t reach his armor. He can’t stand up without using the table as a crutch. Integration is only painless in an ideal procedure, not where splintered AIs are shoved into holes they weren’t meant to fit into, like butchered puzzle pieces.

But Wash stands and he leaves. He forces himself to put on his armor and to take advantage of the absence of guards. They’d come for him, but they would be gone.

_Thank you_ , Epsilon says, floating just behind his eyes, pushing against them, heavy and raw and real in a way a hand or exterior touch could never be.

Wash understands for the first time what North and York had told him all along.

_We’re partners, aren’t we?_ Wash responds.

_Yes_ , Epsilon says, weary and broken but a comforting ghost. _We are._

 

**0000**

It could have been like this:

They are just as hunted and marked as North or South or Maine, but Wash knows they are number one on the list the Director has written. Public enemy number one, because they know too much, because they are every bit of evidence needed to bring Freelancer down, and the Director has always been a careful man.

This time, Wash learns to be careful, too.

Epsilon, despite his madness, is crafty and paranoid and it seeps into Wash’s thoughts. He had never had to be crafty, not like that, to survive. Escaping the Covenant never required breaking into unmanned military outposts for food or bunkering down in abandoned dwellings in half-emptied cities, running from the very people Wash had devoted to so much of his life.

To the people who had nearly destroyed him.

Wash knows they probably succeeded, in the same way they had succeeding in destroying the Alpha.

Wash can remember their success in vivid detail. Or Epsilon does. It’s hard to tell what either is remembering or just recycling.

At first, he hates it and tries to pull the AI. He knows it can be done, because York would do it, but he comes to understand North’s reluctance.

He can feel Epsilon’s fear of being alone as if it were his own fear. He has the vague notion that Epsilon is in too deep into his neurological system and it’s bad for both of them, but there’s no way to tell. No one to tell.

That’s why he knows Epsilon fears the idea of being pulled and finds comfort in being there. In his moments of clarity, the AI is biting and sarcastic and even annoying. He calls Wash an idiot and makes fun of how Wash holds his gun and how horrible Wash’s dark-rimmed eyes were whenever they could access a mirror.

But then those moments are gone and left behind is a hollowed out spirit that makes Wash’s body go cold and hot, when flashes of _Allison_ and the labs and _Alpha_ flicker like a candle in a breeze across their shared mental space.

In those moments, Epsilon doesn’t call Wash an idiot. He admits things that he denies later—that Wash is the only reason he’s still alive, that they had to keep moving, they have to run, because the Director will find them, he’ll kill them, he’ll separate them.

Wash doesn’t know if that makes Epsilon a needy child or something else. Wash can only offer to listen, reeling from the echoing ramblings of an AI that might or might not be insane.

He doesn’t know how well off he is, either, to be fair. He has his own brand of nightmares. He dreams of Carolina, whom he learned was dead months ago and it tore him to pieces so bad, Epsilon was the one who had to keep their broken husk of a body going for a few days. He dreams of Connie, whom he now knows deserve so, so much better.

The others come and go in dreams, not always dead, but when he wakes, Wash realizes he will never see them again.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” he asks, eyes on the ceiling.

_We’re not._

He wishes they were.

Epsilon grips into him, dragging fingers suddenly becoming hooked and desperate. Memories of how close the AI had come that day in the labs to ending it are hot and painful and Wash can’t shake it out of his bones, like a bad electric shock.

He doesn’t wish they were dead.

He wishes things would be as easy as death.

They run and run. By the time Wash realizes they are headed nowhere, it’s too late to think about turning back.

 

**0000**

It could have been like this:

AIs don’t know how to love. They known possession and sometimes, when things go wrong, equate that with love.

It is wrong for an AI to love, for many reasons.

They told them that, along with a bunch of other random information about AI theory, long before implantation started. It was a warm-up for the real event of meeting and having and being had by an AI partner. Wash had paid attention, but the details were lost over time. It hadn’t mattered to remember the basics when getting an AI himself seemed so far away.

Now, he remembers pieces of those pamphlets and documents, coming back to him sometimes in startling moments of realization or slow, dawning moments of understanding.

Close calls are reinforcing moments, in so many ways. There is no one to patch him up. There is only a literal voice in his head that bitterly curses him for every bullet scrape or narrow escape from Recovery agents, because Wash wouldn’t goddamn listen half the time. Wash calls him paranoid for the fifth time and only then does Epsilon hear the insult and respond.

He responds in ways that Wash would not have understood years ago. But drowning in his head comes in two flavors: madness and something he wanted to call boiling hunger.

Epsilon consumes him. Mind, body and what’s left of his soul.

During those moments, there is no line between them. There are no boundaries. Wash is granted clarity and vision into what constitutes AI thought and feeling. They don’t feel with bodies—gasping bursts of anger, headaches born from tears, fear that stops breath—but they feel in ways that go beyond a single moment or words to define them.

There are no words for what Epsilon feels. Wash merely knows. He knows everything in those moments and tries to hold onto that knowledge, before it slips away, along with Epsilon in retreat.

But what Wash feels is real. Or as real as anything gets for him anymore.

Hot fingers drag over his thighs, sinking into his pelvic bone, crushing and real—but it’s not real. But there are nails on his arms, his shoulder blades, digging deep into his muscles and he’s left on the brink of belief in impossibilities.

He comes on the breath of someone else’s name—always someone else. Sometimes Connie, sometimes Allison, sometimes Epsilon himself.

Epsilon wants to feel that—what Wash feels, what Wash is. That’s clear enough. It makes sense. Epsilon is a creature literally born from loss. His madness is partially brought on by a perpetual sense of being incomplete.

When he feels Wash—digs in deep, feeling straight through Wash, through every nerve, feels Wash dig just as deeply into Epsilon—he feels whole, Epsilon tells him. Just for a brief moment, they are whole.

It’s the only thing Wash can offer the AI, and for whatever dangers Epsilon brought into his life, Wash owes him.

Epsilon had been made for him, like a weapon or tool or another addition to his armor. It was because of Wash that he had been carved and shaped and born, even if Wash hadn’t been the one holding the knife.

If that had not broken them, it certainly had bound them together.

Wash allows Epsilon to consume him, because in some ways, he needs this, too.

AIs don’t know how to love.

Wash figures that sometimes, people don’t either.

Possession is nine-tenths of passion, he decides.

 

**0000**

It could have been like this:

Finding the Reds and Blues would have taken longer, much longer, and Wash might never have met them if it wasn’t a matter of fate over deliberate action. He meets them when they had tracked down signs of the Meta over the hacked comm. channel Epsilon found for the Recovery Agents. The Meta corners the simulation soldiers and the Recovery Agent who is assigned to them is dead quicker than Wash ever would have been.

Somehow, the Reds and Blues were all together anyway, unsure who to trust, and unsure of this unhinged Freelancer with an equally unhinged AI. They are together, because that’s way it has to be. They have no choice but to believe, even in this life, because the universe is cruel with its repetitions.

Strangely cruel.

Church does not know him.

It’s startling at first, because Wash knows his voice, those mood swings, that sense of humor that is the only thing that drags the smile across his cracked lips in the dead of night when nightmares shared between them ruin any chance of rest and bad jokes about their grim future is the only funny thing to be found.

To hear that voice—the voice of _Alpha_ , the origins of so many of his nightmares—reject him is somewhat disconcerting.

_But I know you_ , _David_ , Epsilon tells him, rising up and covering him like a shadow, an embrace made of thought and invisible touch.

_I know._

Wash knows and it’s the only thing that grounds him.

**  
0000**

It could have been like this:

He goes there to die, among other things.

At the Freelancer compound, with the Meta right on their heels, he tells Epsilon to go with the Blues. To go and tell their story, to find the right authorities, to bring down the Director like they had always wanted.

Epsilon doesn’t latch into him like he had before under the threat of being removed from Wash’s head. He doesn’t panic or get angry. He just shows up in front of Wash, a rare holographic display, unneeded most times since he can show so much more inside of Wash’s head.

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” Epsilon tells him.

“You know what’s going to happen,” Wash says, trying to reason.

Epsilon flickers before him. “David,” he says and that’s all he has to say.

Epsilon doesn’t leave him like North and York did. He doesn’t die alone or at the hands of someone he trusted like Carolina or in the arms of a hated enemy like Connie. He doesn’t betray him like South or Maine.

He lingers in a way nothing else had for Wash, in his entire life.

A linger specter, a half-mad memory, a stabilizing force with the toxicity of a narcotic.

His.

“Okay,” Wash says, steeling himself.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Epsilon tells him, sane and cocky and the being he should have been all along, without madness to ruin him. “I’ve got your back.”

“I know you do,” Wash says, smiling—probably for the last time.

Getting the Alpha to come along with his personified twin isn’t as hard as realizing that even their last ditch effort might not work. That fighting the Meta in such a cornered spot is an impossibility and Wash might just die there anyway, without being able to do anything for Epsilon or Alpha in hindsight.

_We’re going_ together _,_ Epsilon urges him, doing whatever he can to negate the effects of blood loss from the surprise gunshot to Wash’s stomach.

_Yes_ , Wash agrees, struggling to sit up with the computer.

The Meta walks closer, his footfall thunderous and menacing and nothing like his friend he now knows is dead and gone with the rest of their team.

When the EMP is ready—and Alpha is reeling louder and louder in his head, fighting Epsilon, ready to jump—Wash looks back at the Meta and the unseen Director.

There is jet-black, poisonous satisfaction, watching Church take down everything the Director had built in just a split second of revealing himself. Watching the Meta self-destruct. Knowing that everything had been worth it, for that moment, to end it.

And he is not alone, dying on a hospital bed, left behind.

Because Epsilon is there, in that lightening-fast moment, where they share a thousand more last chances.

_We’re partners_ , Wash says.

_Partners_ , Epsilon echoes. Their last testament.

The EMP goes off.

It ends as it should have.

They would have been together.

 

**0000**

Instead, it is like this:

Wash sits alone outside of the wreckage heap that constitutes the New Republic’s base on Chorus, lucky to be alive and unlucky to have allowed dangerous enemies to leave, to pose them all harm someday soon.

His team is alive and back together, the war is over, and he can breathe—sort of. Broken ribs and stab wounds make that hard, but no harder than it’s ever been before for him. Physical wounds are easy to ignore with practice.

The doubt of what could have been is harder to shake, because that’s always been harder for him to shake. The what-ifs of if Tucker hadn’t made it, or if Felix has been faster than Carolina, or if the New Republic and Federal Army hadn’t stopped in time. The what-ifs of his old friends still being alive, of him never having gone to Freelancer to begin with, to having kept Epsilon until it actually killed him—it was all there still and ready to be dragged out at any given point.

Night like those, when he had time to reflect, were the worst.

It doesn’t help when Epsilon comes to him. It’s unexpected, mostly because Wash is alone and Epsilon has never seemed able to get close to him without anger or nervousness between them.

That night, it seems like the AI has things to say to Wash, however.

“You still alive?” the AI immediately asks, as a joke, glimmering in the air as he appears there like a real phantom. “Jesus, you are like a cockroach.”

“Epsilon,” Wash says in greeting. He nods his head; his head is one of the few parts of him that isn’t injured. “Nice work with the camera.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m awesome,” Epsilon says, with personality that he only had because of this life, this existence, that wouldn't have been so prominent in any other. “Nice job, too, by the way. With getting your ass kicked.”

Wash snorts. “Thanks.”

“No seriously, you and Carolina were great distractions,” the AI continues. “I know you guys could have mopped the floor with those two a-holes.”

“Locus isn’t a push over,” Wash says, frowning. His ribs throb in agreement.

Epsilon makes a derisive sound. “Yeah, well, just take the compliment, jackass.”

Wash doesn’t remember the Epsilon he met that day in the labs. He remembers what Epsilon said and showed him—he remembers his simulated death—but he doesn’t remember what kind of voice he had. He tries to imagine hearing Church’s belligerent ranting in the corridors of the _Mother of Invention_ , inside of his head, and fails.

It is not dissimilar to seeing two different shaped puzzle pieces side by side; he cannot imagine them fitting into each other. It is impossible. Irreconcilable.

Wash wonders, among the other things he knew he had lost for certain, just how much he had lost or gained in the things that never came to pass.

“Don’t do that,” Epsilon suddenly says, startling Wash, who hadn’t noticed they had fallen silent out there on the rubble. It is surprising that the AI had lingered at all.

“Do what?” he asks, looking back at the AI.

“What Carolina always does,” Epsilon says. He shakes his holographic head. “Looking out at nothing, back at things that aren’t there anymore. That’s no way to live.”

Wash stares at him. “Says the robot who purposely split his head up again to focus.”

“Hey!” Epsilon exclaims, angry. “I do what I have to.”

“Me, too,” Wash says, ignoring how Epsilon falters at that.

He wonders about what-if worlds and lives he never lived. He can’t help it. He wonders if Epsilon has the same problems, keeping those thoughts away. Carolina probably did, too. All the doubts of their actions and failures were reliable midnight companions.

“For what it’s worth,” Epsilon begins, more than a little hesitant. “I think things turned out as good as they could have possibly gone.”

“You really think that?” Wash asks.

“We’re alive, aren’t we?” Epsilon responds. “And we’re whole.”

In some ways, they were.

Nodding, Wash doesn’t argue. “I guess we are.”

“Washington,” Epsilon starts to say, but he stops himself.

Wash sees him struggle—because Epsilon doesn’t apologize. He won’t ever say sorry for the things he did, voluntarily or not, to Wash all those years ago. He can’t. Wash knows that and he understands. He finally understands.

“I know,” he says, for the AI, instead.

Epsilon glimmers like starlight and Wash can feel him, just that once—that self-directed anger, frustration and fear that made little sense when expressed out loud.

And then it’s gone. It never happened.

“Go get some sleep, you idiot,” Epsilon says, the glimmering faded, like he’s deflated. The annoyance in his voice is affected by trace amounts of things Wash can’t and will not identify. He doesn’t have the strength to.

“Yeah,” he agrees. He slowly stands.

“I’m keeping an eye out for trouble,” Epsilon says. He hesitates and then repeats himself. “Go get some sleep.”

Wash stares at him and in the aftermath of dwelling on the what-ifs of so many goddamn things—like losing Tucker in the med-bay or any of his friends dying because he couldn’t win against Locus—sees a thousand possibilities of what could or should have been.

But they were not.

Instead, it was this.

And Epsilon was right.

“Good night,” Wash says, turning away, smiling.

This was as good as they could have possibly gotten.

 

**End.**


End file.
